There are many ways to make money online and forum marketing is just one of the low cost methods you can use to get traffic and even direct sales. You don't need any money at all to make money with forums but for some of the more advanced techniques you might need to make a little investment.
In order to make money with forums you will need:
- A niche market
- A forum account
- An affiliate program
- Your own product
- A website
- An autoresponder
- Your own forum
>> Forum Marketing With Your Signature
One common mistake made in forums is spamming by inexperienced marketers. In fact, if you do have experience and you make this mistake, you will be perceived as inexperienced. Spamming isn't just unsolicited emails...its any marketing message that is unsolicited and intrusive.
To avoid coming off as a spammer, you need to build a relationship with the community which you are now a part of. This can mean just being generally helpful on the forums, responding to discussions and asking questions without promoting anything within these posts.
To make money with forum marketing, you will need to add a signature. Most forums provide you with a space in the profile section where you can edit your signature. Here you will place your affiliate link for the product you're promoting or a link to your own product if you own one. Your signature will be attached to every post you make.
Once you keep posting with your signature and being helpful, your signature will start getting noticed and people will click to find out more about what you're involved with. This can lead to sales, signups if you link to an optin page and even subscriptions if you link to your own blog.
Just be sure to heed the forum rules and any rules they might have for signatures.
- Tip: In a non internet marketing related forum, building a relationship before you add a signature works best. Add your signature after about 20 posts.
Some forums have a section where you can advertise your site or affiliate offers. Most of these sections still have rules while some let anything go. These advertising sections go by different names like "Ads and Offers" or simply "Advertise your Business".
You can use these sections to write short ads or articles that point to the product you're advertising. I usually use it these sections as part of my link building strategy and link to my landing page.
The best way to use this section is to optimize your post title for the search engines since some forums do rank highly. This way you'll get search engine traffic as well as traffic from the forum itself. If you did a good job at building a relationship first then you're more likely to get your ad checked out.
- Tip: Use bullets, pictures and other edits to make your ad as attractive as possible.
We're talking real estate, baby. If you're a regular forum poster, you may be able to offer your signature for rent. You can make money this way by advertising a spot in your sig or responding to offers.
This is one of those methods not talked about much but if you're struggling to make money online, you can use this method as a way to get some change while learning. Both you and the advertiser benefit but it would be a plus if you also knew a little about the product just in case you get an private messages.
You can use your signature to advertise space, post in the advertising section of the forum or contact an advertiser directly.
- Tip: If you're an advertiser then you can purchase forum signature space to help increase traffic to your site. You get all the benefits of posting in forums without having to build a relationship yourself and of course, time to be productive in other areas.
Another option to making money with forums is to own the forum. This way you have control just like owning your own website and you can monetize the pages with Adsense, sell banner space and affiliate programs.
The best thing about this is that you can get pages added to your forum everyday when users create a topic. No headaches trying to come up with content - its all user generated. The hardest part is to get the forum going and be able to retain membership.
Installing a forum is as simple as getting a domain and a good web host. Make sure the web host has cPanel and something called Fantastico (most hosting has this anyway). The forum scripts are free to install with a few clicks and you'll be up and running in seconds.
Apply for a Google Adsense account and add it to the forum and you're ready to go.
- Tip: You don't have to own the forum to make money from Adsense. Some forums allow you to share ad revenue. Grab your adsense id and add it to any adsense revenue sharing forum that you're a part of.
Further Reading:
Autoresponders:
Websites:
Hosting:
Domains:
Finding a Niche:
Monetization:
Forum Software:
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